]]>Holiday time is the perfect time to catch up with what’s happening in the Twitter feeds. I happened to come across quite a few gems and so I’ve put them together in a quick Haiku presentation with the idea that it might be useful to begin a teacher led PD technology session.

This holiday period I resumed reading a text on how to make iPhone and iPad apps. Why? Well, I was asking myself that very question after reading two chapters! But, basically it’s on my “Bucket List”. Some people want to leap out of flying planes. Not me, I’m perfectly sensible. Anyway, ever since my first iPod, I’ve always had a desire to create a useful app. Nothing flash, just something that would be useful for me and perhaps other teachers too. I have a few ideas, but I’ll keep them close to my chest for the moment.

So, after remembering my initial reasons for reading these torturous chapters, I resolved to use the text’s accompanying DVD as the sole source of information…for the time being anyway. Lucky this text had this medium included. It makes much more sense to my learning skills. I’m a hands on, let’s do something type of learner. Mind you, I could provide a few lessons to the presenter and the developer of the screencast DVD on how to present material, but that’s another story.

So XCode is open. I’m following instructions on the DVD. When suddenly an example doesn’t work! Yikes, how on earth do you problem-solve and follow the coding in XCode? There’s files, variables and code everywhere! Not even my techie teenager can figure it out. Mind you, he’s an Android user and we have a healthy debate quite frequently about the benefits or discrepancies between the two iOS platforms. In the end, I trashed the project and started again. Second time around it worked, but I started thinking that I needed to know a bit more about the underlying code and file structure of XCode. Especially when the assistant editor is used to link objects.

Next step, Objective C. Well, before I go there, all the websites I “Googled” recommended knowing C programming language. Now I’m delving into C and thankfully it’s similar in some respects to Pascal and other programming languages I learnt many, many years ago.

Maybe jumping out of a plane would be easier? It certainly wouldn’t take as long!